How Does Anger Seduce Practical Rationality?

Back in the Spring, I gave a talk down at Columbia University, "Sweeter Than Honey" - An Aristotelian Account of Anger's Seduction of Practical Rationality during which I ranged over a number of related topics in Aristotle's moral theory, all of them connected with anger as an emotional response.

Anger is a matter about which Aristotle does have a lot of useful and insightful things to tell us, and I've been researching and writing on Aristotle's theory of anger for about eight years, working on a book-length study of his views and their present applicability.

One of my YouTube subscribers emailed me, raising an interesting question about the talk, to which I've decided to respond here in this blog:  What did you mean by “anger seducing practical reason”?  That anger, through its sweetness, seduces practical reason into giving assent to our doing things that it wouldn’t otherwise assent to?   When you think about it that way, anger can be a terribly destructive force, because it’s a drug – literally; it’s partly chemical --- that clouds our reason.

What Does Gratitude Require?

There's a marked tendency to talk a lot about "gratitude" these days.  In fact, usually springboarding off an oft-quoted passage by Cicero, namely that "gratitude is not only the greatest of the virtues, but the parent of them" -- and then never engaging with Cicero's thought again after that -- there's even quite a lot of buzz about gratitude in terms of virtue ethics, or at least what we might call "virtue-lite morality."  There's also a rising and somewhat paradoxical tendency to focus on the positive effects of gratitude on the life, the attitude, even the physical health of the grateful person.

I wonder myself at times whether we really ought to include "gratitude" among the virtues, or whether --  as I've argued elsewhere about forgiveness -- we ought instead better regard it as something connected with and flowing from virtues, but not actually a virtue in its own right.  That's a topic on which I admittedly need to do more thinking.  But, one thing I have been reflecting upon quite a bit lately, is what gratitude ought to look like.  Or, you might say, how far it ought to extend in attitude and action, if it is really to be gratitude.

Bullying, Basketball, and Courage

What I consider to be some good news came out of my home state recently -- actually occurring a year ago, but back in public view again just this last week.  By now likely many readers have already glimpsed  in their news feeds the inspirational (but all too brief) story coming out of Kenosha, Wisconsin.

It is about three middle-school basketball players coming to the aid of one of their classmates -- a cheerleader with Downs syndrome who was being made fun of by some fans attending a game.  The players walked off the court in the middle of a game, and up to the stands, where they confronted those fans, and told them to "knock it off."  That would seem to both require and exemplify a certain kind, or at least measure, of courage.  It also raises a number of interesting questions, particularly when we add in some additional background information -- at least from a virtue ethics perspective.

A Short Review: "What Is Character? Virtue Ethics In Education"

For the last week and a half, I've been participating in a MOOC focused on Character Education and Virtue Ethics -- What Is Character? Virtue Ethics In Education, developed by the University of Birmingham (specifically, by the Jubilee Center for Character and Virtues), and hosted on the FutureLearn Platform.  I'd been looking forward to this relatively short course (only 2 weeks) for some time -- it's enjoyable from time to time to slip back into the role of student rather than professor, and let someone else do the course design and teaching.

I've been idly kicking around the idea of reviewing virtue-, character-, and more general ethics-focused books, courses, and other resources on this blog, and the invitation to reflect upon the course built in near the end of it presented me with an occasion to to precisely that.  So, here it goes.  Overall, I'd award it a solid B- , but that grade is partly due to the fact that it's free of charge.  I'd recommend taking it to most people interested in the subject-matters covered.

Aristotle on Anger, Virtue and Vice.

I was recently invited up to Green Mountain College, just across the border in Vermont, to provide a faculty development workshop and also to give a talk about Aristotle, anger, and virtue ethics.  The latter talk was intended primarily for undergraduate students taking an Ethics course in the Environmental Liberal Arts core program at Green Mountain, and it provided me with a useful occasion to do a bit more thinking about some of the topics corralled together in a book I'm writing, focused specifically on Aristotle and his theory of anger.

As I remarked early on in the talk -- which you can hear here, or watch here -- one of the most distinctive features of Aristotle's approach to anger is that, unlike so many other ancient, medieval, and modern thinkers, he doesn't consider anger uniformly or even generally bad.  In fact, he comes right out in saying that there are times when we ought to get angry -- to feel the emotion and to act upon it.  It's not just a question of whether it's psychologically good for us to express our anger sometimes, nor is it simply an issue of prudently maintaining boundaries or responding to bullying -- for Aristotle, anger is at its very core a moral issue, a matter of character.

Honor and Ethics: Some Initial Reflections

A friend and colleague of mine, Bruce Weinstein, raised a provocative question, tapping the expertise and sounding the sentiments of his many Facebook friends:   

"What do you think of "Live Honorably" as my proposed slogan? I'd use it as a way to let people know how they would benefit from my talks, training, books, and consultations."
It sparked a conversation revealing -- and reflective of -- quite a few different viewpoints on the relationship between honor and ethics.  He also proposed that I weigh in on the matter, so that's precisely what I intend to do here.

Are the Virtues Already In Us?

In my Ethics classes, one type of assessment and exercise I routinely require my students to engage in is what I call an Application Assignment.  I provide them with a complex, morally ambiguous, problematic scenario, which they then have to analyze along various lines.  I'll write more about those parameters in a follow-up post, and discuss just how the assignments work to foster student learning at several different levels.  For now, what I'd like to focus on is one very interesting, common, and revealing mistake I see some students make semester after semester.

A key component of the assignment is competently applying three of the moral theories we've been studying to the case in question.  This requires that the students do a bit of explaining about the key concepts of the theory, and then go on to particularize these to the characters of the narrative.  Students do all right with Egoism, with the authoritarian Might-Makes-Right theory, and often enough with Utilitarianism.  Many of them run into problems with Virtue Ethics, and there are a variety of distinct misunderstandings and misapplications.  I'm particularly interested in one recurring way students get matters wrong.  Some students interpret Virtue Ethics as asserting that the virtues lie within each and every person, ready to be used when situations call for them.

What is the Emotivist Person Like?

I'm back in full swing once again teaching an Ethics course at Marist College (actually, just coming off of teaching a very intensive 4-week online Ethics course, before launching right back into Spring face-to-face courses), and we just finished discussing Alasdair MacIntyre's diagnosis of Emotivism (in After Virtue) as the moral theory that has become embedded and embodied in our late modern culture.  Last year, around this point in the semester, I wrote two blog posts focusing on that diagnosis (here and here). There's three particularly important features to MacIntyre's account -- precisely why I have my students read chapters 2 and 3 of After Virtue at the start of the semester.

First, MacIntyre does not think that many people in our contemporary culture explicitly endorse one of the academic forms of emotivism (derived from Ayer or Stevenson, Nietzsche or Sartre) -- rather their behavior, actions, expressions betray an implicit reliance on that moral theory as their default, the horizon within which they act and move and work out their being. Second, MacIntyre also does not think emotivism is remotely close to being correct or adequate as a moral theory.  But, if there are many people who on some gut-level do seem to think it the right theory, and act, judge, and communicate as if it was, that has some real implications for our moral environment.  Third, MacIntyre does not see these developments as particularly good ones -- even for the emotivist.  And, that is what I'm going to discuss here -- starting from the question: what kind of person does a lived-out commitment to Emotivism make one into?

Rational Limits on Pursuit of Pleasure

I've been researching and writing the follow-up post to my Thanksgiving-time reflections on gratitude -- digging into corners and crannies of texts I've run through previously but hadn't reread recently -- portions of writings of Cicero, Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, David Hume, Thomas Aquinas, and Adrian Peperzak.  Rather than attempt to draw all those varied threads into one knot, or at least braid at this time, I've decided today to write instead about one of the several topics I'll be discussing tonight at the first in a new series of philosophy-centered events:  Philosophy Eats.  Tonight, it's Hedonism on the menu, both figuratively -- I'll be giving a talk and then leading a discussion -- and quite literally -- the chef and owner of Global Palate, Jessica Winchell, has assembled an amazingly aphrodisiac set of courses.

One of the matters I mean to bring up -- but not to go into full detail about -- has to do with setting rational limitations on the pursuit of pleasure, as well as one the avoidance of pleasure's contrary or opposite, pain.  There are hedonists, of course, for whom there are no restraints upon pleasure-seeking -- the popular conception associating hedonism with the adage "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die" -- but in point of fact, most hedonists (and certainly those who thought enough about it to leave behind some coherent moral doctrine) don't act according to such an extreme, and likely short-lived, interpretation of that basic idea. 

A Few Reflections on Gratitude

Another Thanksgiving day has come and gone,bringing in its wake postings and platitudes, and occasionally deeper reflections and expressions of gratitude, the disposition, emotion, or attitude inextricably involved with thanks.  Thankfulness and giving thanks are important, but often overlooked, matters for ethics, a soon-or-later necessary dimension of any sustained, common, well-oriented moral life. Why do we discuss it as infrequently as we do in my field, moral theory?

I suspect for many of the same reasons it's not all that much more often discussed specifically, thematically, whether we look to other academic or professional disciplines,  or turn our gaze upon the broader spheres of ordinary activity -- we've got so much else to focus on, attend to, and talk about together.  Time runs out, seemingly more quickly each passing year -- and so paradoxically, we have to cut out and dedicate a portion of that ever-scarcer resource in order to "make the time" for giving thanks, let alone thinking about, meditating upon, pondering gratitude.  And yet, if we pay attention, it is not too difficult to discover, even stumble across philosopher and theologians who did examine and analyze this distinctively human attitude, affect, and activity.

Is Partisanship a Vice?

We're near the end of the long-dragged-out forced march of another national election season -- though "season" has become a misnomer for a process that now takes well over a year.  The main debates are finished -- those two-side televised contests, a lion's share of limelight going to the presidential contenders, a healthy share taken by their sidekick cubs, with scraps, offal, trimmings, and marrowless bones left for the publicity-starved third-party debaters to wrest away or share -- whatever they may decide. I must register my partial relief now that the debates are finished -- merely partial though, because it takes almost no time in our media-saturated environment for the assessments of these back and forth staged deliberative discussions to proliferate.

And, it actually would not be that bad if in fact most of what passes for commentary actually did comprise something like "assessments" -- even admittedly biased ones. What is so galling, so irritating, and so . . . downright depressing is the spectacle, repeated almost endlessly of people I thought I knew better -- and thought more highly of -- blithely in some cases, snidely and smugly in others, and in yet others accompanied by vitriol, rabidity, fear-mongering and ultimatums, engage themselves in what is really just pure partisanship, plain and simple -- all the while concealing that very behavior from themselves, and projecting it onto their political opponents.  Not only is there a visible, palpable viciousness (in the general sense) coloring both their filters and their statements -- there's also a distinctively moral slippage, a continued and unmarked failure, a different and more troubling viciousness --expression of which, and encounter with which, is rapidly becoming a nearly unavoidable dimension of everyday existence.

Blogging About Anger Past and Future

One topic -- or rather, when you start looking into it, sprawling network of nodes and notes -- I've long been interested in. . . and by "long" I mean most of my life. . . is Anger.  I'll admit that my interest was much more of a predominantly practical rather than detachedly speculative nature from the very start.  As far back as I can remember, I've struggled with and been puzzled by, suffered from others' and indulged in my own states or spells of anger.  I've held grudges, been righteously indignant, choked anger down, attempted to dispel or quell it with reasoning, by acts of forgiveness -- sometimes even did feel it less-than-expectedly ebb away or immediately dissolve.  I've fought with my fists and feet -- though thankfully not for a long time -- nursed and nourished silent resentments until the moment to strike back, shouted vile things, ran off in a rage, sometimes even -- as I got to understand anger's contours and lines of force both in general and in myself -- removed myself from situations.

To employ a distinction made first (as far as I know), by the great Christian Existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel, for me the topic of anger as such is not a problem, but rather a mystery.

Is "Ethical Hacker" An Oxymoron? (part 1 of 2)

According to a recent Forbes piece, Exploding The Myth of The "Ethical Hacker", there have long been ongoing discussions and debates bearing upon the question whether that term or concept really makes sense.  Perhaps, like Martin Heidegger quipped about "Christian philosophy" (a stance, incidentally, whose flaws many pointed out) being as coherent as the notion of "wooden iron," there's something to the almost logical repugnance that many seem to feel arise when "ethical" and "hacker" are conjoined.

The article, contributed by Conrad Constantine and Dominique Karg -- the latter of whom bears the title "Chief Hacking Officer" -- makes some decent, well-articulated arguments against the propriety or prudence of speaking of some hackers as "ethical hackers."  They're raising, or spilling over into, some very interesting moral issues of wider scope, which are worth noting, even exploring a bit here.  The deeper question about connections between terminology, good or bad actions, personality and dispositions, and moral evaluation is one with a long history in moral theory -- addressed, explored, examined by philosophers ranging from Plato and Aristotle, to Confucius, Thomas Aquinas, and Jeremy Bentham.

Hate and Anger in Aristotle

When we come to what are often called "negative emotions" -- things like fear, jealousy, anger, hatred -- feelings, affective responses, moods -- there seems to be a strong tendency in our contemporary society, particularly when it's a matter of politics or culture -- to do three different but connected things.  One of these is to easily, even automatically, project these onto others, typically others against whom we sense ourselves as being opposed.  Another is to deny or rename them on our own parts, or failing that, to excuse them in ourselves by displacing responsibility to those other people who "started it," i.e. who provoked the reactive emotion on our own parts.  The third is to employ and invoke language or concepts of emotions and morality in careless, uncritical, simplistic ways.

A prime example of this is the indiscriminate use of the term "hate."  As of late, the Left has proven itself more effective than the Right in misusing this term and notion, extending it to their opponents, whether real, assumed, or only imagined -- but they certainly don't have a monopoly upon it.  With a few exceptions -- typically those glorying in it -- it seems most people are willing to take for granted that "hate" or "hatred" is always bad, so accusing another of it, or being accused oneself, takes on a status almost of a logical deduction.  Hate is bad.  So-and-so hates.  Thus, So-and-so is bad (and we're justified in hating them, or maybe just expressing our outrage, or disapproval, or pity, or. . . )  Aristotle said several useful things about hate -- and about the closely associated emotional dynamic of anger -- which would well be worth considering in our current cultural situation.

Weeds in the Garden of Moral Life

When I returned, about a week and half ago, from my summer travels, a restorative period of reconnecting face to face with friends and family, it was no surprise to find the little garden I'd cleared and planted with herbs, strawberries, and peppers , now covered over with weeds, invaded and seemingly conquered at every available inch of dirt.  After all, I basically abandoned the planted plot not only to the elements of sun, rain, wind, but also to encroachments by other plants seeded within the soil, imperfectly rooted out previously, or straying past the border of bricks.  Given the garden's diminutive scale, thoroughly weeding it anew was thankfully just a matter of an afternoon's effort -- but careful, attentive work, for the weeds had been allowed to grow, as is their wont, not only over, not only within, but intertwined with the other plants.

Culling crabgrass, bugle-weed, and other invasive species out from patches of strawberry, thyme, or rosemary, demands a gardener's eye, discerning patterns of leaf, stalk, and shoot from each other, and hands that follow, gently, teasingly until the moment for pulling, separating out the good from the bad, the desirable from that which desires to choke and supplant it.  As the hours passed, more and more soil cleared of green, except for the plants originally intended for those spots, similitudes between gardening, the husbandry of soil and seed, and the processes of moral life, practice, development suggested themselves to me, tangibly, tactilely, experimentally, as much as in concept and language.  Gardening -- like related activities of landclearing and trailblazing, berry-picking and foraging, finding and transplanting plants -- can easily turn into merely utilitarian, practical activity, but it also just as much admits room, and conduces to a readiness, for contemplation.

Boethius on Mistaken Views on Happiness (part 2 of 2)

Last month, in an earlier post, I brought Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy into a conversation that, among Virtue Ethicists, tends to circle around the works and thought of two figures, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.  Both thinkers, as contemporary Virtue Ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre argues, carry out something very important in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Treatise On Happiness, a dialectical examination of various possible contenders to the good for human beings, i.e. happiness -- and what each one of us has to do within the story comprising our own lives, according to MacIntyre, is to carry out a moral inquiry analogous to those landmark dialectical, universal, and in that sense rather abstract investigations of moral philosophy.  For you see, as human beings, as plain persons, we really live in the concrete, we ask about particular goods and whether they will make us happy.  We work these matters out, not necessarily divorced from universal considerations, but within specific contexts and situations.

Boethius' own inquiry into happiness bridges the gap between a philosophical, universal moral inquiry into happiness and a personal, particular, even pressing situation in which he finds himself -- a prison cell, unjustly accused, his happiness in whole and in its parts seemingly undone by an unreliable fortune.  Philosophia -- wisdom, or at least its pursuit, personified -- comes to his aid, engaging in discourse, exhortation, dialogue with the glum philosopher and courtier, and among the topics over which they range is precisely that one:  what is happiness?  Who has got it right, and who has got it wrong?  And most importantly -- what makes this philosophical -- why are the wrong views wrong?  What's wrong about them?  To answer that, of course, also requires setting out something more about what's right, rather than just that it is right.

Questioning Continuous Improvement (part 1 of 2)

The relatively new term "continuous improvement" is one of those buzzwords that by its very connotative penumbra manages to project a kind of positivity, and it burrowed its way into and eventually set down roots within education circles some time ago.  That's not surprising -- there's a continual back and forth flow between the worlds of education and business, along the channels of marketing, management, training, and that ever-so-ambiguous domain of "leadership."

Throughout my own career in academia, first as a student, then as a professor, a writer, and a coordinator of faculty development and assessment of student learning, a constant background  has been this discourse between the world of business and that of education, sometimes low as an almost soundless murmur, other times out in the open, seemingly subsuming all the available attention from every other kind of activity.  I'd say that in the last five years in particular, "continuous improvement" has shoved and elbowed its way to the front off the line of formulations frequently on the lips and minds of college and university administrators, trickling down to department chairs and committees detailed with laboring that concept, producing plans, reporting data, then doing the whole thing all over again.

Questioning Continuous Improvement

Recently, Harvard Business Review blogger Ron Ashkenas argued a case that It's Time to Rethink Continuous Improvement -- a very welcome suggestion.  I've noted myself, in an Orexis Dianoētikē blog post, that too much weight given to a closely related and similarly endorsed notion, "best practices," not only can easily become a substitute for real thought and good practical reasoning, becoming counter-productive in the process -- the uncritical attitude towards these sorts of buzzword concepts is often indicative of a deeper failure, one which assumes form as institutional culture.

Boasting, Desire, and Truth about Oneself

Once again, the always expanding human capacities of natural science and technology, coupled with the queries and questions of psychologists (and other social scientists) reopen questions long ago addressed, thought not entirely resolved -- by those working in the older humanistic disciplines, particularly philosophy and theology.  This time, the news about the results and interpretation of brain scans and surveys have to do with an eminently human preoccupation -- talking about ourselves.  Apparently, talking about oneself -- that's the way the majority of the stories run -- actives the same pleasure centers in the brain as other activities, for instance  having sex.

A study by Harvard researchers concludes that found written or verbal expression about oneself -- "self-disclosure" holds “intrinsic value” for the person engaging in it, providing pleasure to them.  The study got reported, along with a lot of very interesting speculation naturally flowing from the topic, in the Telegraph and the Wall Street Journal among other places, and then spread through the internet.  Interestingly, sites and networks have highlighted different aspects of the study and its implications, some focusing on the written (generally social media) type of expression, others on self-expression in verbal communication. The tone of many has been along the lines of more or less positive "aha!  well, that's no surprise, but glad we know it now," but there have been some exceptions, for instance, Shouts From The Abyss' interpretation of the study as bearing on a phenomenon of "conversational masturbation."  On the other extreme would be the Royal Society for Public Health's conclusion that talking about oneself is a vital component of one's well being.   So, what should we make of this new research?

Yves Simon on Moral Virtue (part 2 of 2)

Last month, I wrote a rather longish entry (at least for this blog) setting out a few themes from Yves Simon's excellent short work, The Definition of Moral Virtue, focusing in that post on two things in particular:  his identification of three moral positions common in modernity which attempt to dispense with the traditional conception of virtue, and the implications of his distinction between nature and use as modes of goodness or badness.  What I left unaddressed was another major theme of his book, the difference between mere habits and habitus.  

That the virtues -- and for that matter the vices -- are at their bases, in the sort of being which they have, habits is a standard commonplace of Virtue Ethics.  You can find that term readily used in most translations of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, or Aquinas' Disputed Questions on Virtue and Treatise On the Virtues, as well as in other classic texts of Virtue Ethics traditions of moral enquiry.  Simon cautions us against that, however, showing how the Greek hexis and its Latin translation habitus involve something more and something different than the concept "habit" which we so often unthinkingly substitute in their place -- and in telling us why, he also teaches us some important and often overlooked lessons about virtue and vice.

Boethius on Mistaken Views of Happiness (part 1 of 2)

One of the essays I assign my Ethics students at the beginning of the semester is Alasdair MacIntyre's Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy: Rules, Virtues and Goods (included in the Macintyre Reader). One reason I use that short piece is that it introduces an important theme, the idea that we are all, whether we realize it or not, involved in the processes of asking and answering certain fundamental questions:

. . . on an Aristotelian view, the questions posed by the moral philosopher and the questions posed by the plain person are to a certain degree inseparable.  And it is with questions that each begins, for each is engaged in enquiry, the plain person often unsystematically asking"What is my good?" and "What actions will achieve it?" and the moral philosopher systematically enquiring "What is the good for human beings?" and "what kind of actions will achieve the good?"  Any persistent attempt to answer either of these sets of questions soon leads to asking the other.

In MacIntyre's view -- and I think he's right -- we are all of us committed to one or another -- some more some less consistently -- to one moral theory or another, whether explicitly, consciously, deliberately so, or whether only implicitly, accepting it perhaps as the default, following a trajectory of desire we have failed, avoided, or even not had the opportunity to think out.  When we see these sorts of moral matters from a different perspective, we imaginatively place ourselves in the perspective of another, rival moral theory.  When we leave one perspective behind and adopt another -- whether by a gradual process or a sudden conversions -- we shift our allegiance from one moral theory to another.